The results offer deep insights into Afghanistan’s evolving media landscape and how millions of Afghans consume television, radio, and digital content in 2024, which can help businesses, broadcasters, and organizations understand the audience landscape in this unique market.

Here, we highlight some key findings from the study and provide free access to the report.

Key Findings

Television Remains Dominant

Television continues to be a significant source of information and entertainment, with 67% of Afghan adults watching TV at least monthly. Key findings include:

• Tolo, Tolo News, and Ariana lead terrestrial TV channels.
• Among satellite channels, Afghanistan International dominates with 47% reach, followed by GEM Bollywood at 36%.
• Female viewership notably exceeds male viewership for several major channels.
• Prime time viewing peaks during the 6 PM-10 PM slot
• Politics, sports, and drama are the most-watched programming genres.

Radio’s Continued Relevance

While radio reaches a smaller audience than television, it remains an important medium, with 38% of adult Afghans tuning in monthly, mostly adults over 18. Here are some findings:

• BBC maintains the highest listenership with 27.35% reach.
• Arman and Azadi follow with 20.69% and 19.33% reach respectively.
• Education, news, and politics are the most popular radio programming genres.

Digital Media’s Growing Impact

The digital transformation in Afghanistan is evident through solid engagement with online platforms:

• 60% of Afghans access the internet on an average day.
• 61% use social media platforms daily.
• 28% consume television or video content online.

Digital Platform Preferences:

• YouTube leads video streaming platforms with 69% usage
• Facebook dominates social media with 47% usage, followed by Instagram.
• Emerging platforms like TikTok and Snapchat show growing adoption at 7% each

Download the FREE Report

Want to dive deeper into Afghanistan’s media landscape? Download our comprehensive report to get insights into:

• Media audience universe estimates, with detailed demographic breakdowns.
• Top Terrestrial and Satellite TV Stations by reach and gender, with hour-by-hour audience tracking.
• The most watched TV programme genres.
• Radio station rankings by reach and gender.
• Top radio genres.
• Internet access and usage.
• Top social media platforms
• Top Streaming Video OnDemand (SVOD) platforms.

Fill out this form to get the free report:

Implications for Media Stakeholders

Reliable audience data is crucial for sustaining a functioning media ecosystem, especially in a complex environment like Afghanistan. The GeoPoll Media Viewership Survey provides broadcasters, advertisers, and organizations with insights to optimize programming, allocate resources effectively, and understand what content resonates most with the public.

For example, the data suggests a multi-platform approach may be practical, combining traditional broadcast media with digital channels to maximize reach.

Overall, despite ongoing challenges, Afghanistan maintains a diverse and active media ecosystem, with audiences engaging across traditional and digital platforms. This further points to the continuing importance of media in Afghan society and its role in keeping the population informed and connected.

To learn more about this study and our work in Afghanistan and across the world, please contact us.

The post Afghanistan Media Landscape: Key Insights from GeoPoll’s 2024 Survey appeared first on GeoPoll.

The Strata conference certainly lives up to its own billing and name.  O’Reilly Media stresses that “Strata is more than a conference. It’s the essential training and information source for data science and big data—with industry news, reports, in-person and online events, and much more.”  Strata attendees are offered layer upon layer of trainings, talks, and tutorials over the three day conference. In practice, “making data work” for many attendees means using creative math and engineering to quickly answer questions from large, often streaming real-time data sources.

For vendors and many attendees at the 2014 Strata conference, “Big data” is not merely a business buzzword but their central infrastructure and intellectual challenge.  There were talks from the biggest in the business on how “big data” impacts everyone, and what specific companies are doing with it.  For example, Google engineers have built a 10-layer neural network that they claim can do any task that a human can do in 0.1 seconds, such as simple image classification.  Twitter talked about the custom stack they have built to maintain and update 220 million time series  every minute, making historical research possible in real-time. The exhibition halls featured hundreds of squawking vendors hawking their wares to representatives from a wide variety of high-transaction industries.

I spoke as part of the Connected World track.  Other Connected World talks provided useful frameworks for gaining insights by asking good research questions and creative ways to increase impact by encouraging colleagues act on your research insights.

Building on the other talks about research and data, I was excited to present some of the insights we have gleaned from the millions of polls we have sent on GeoPoll platform. In a nut shell, my talk covered three game-changing tools for reaching the billions who are “offline”: surveys, dial-pads, and SMS.  These tools are invaluable when organizations are trying to understand and assist audiences in developing worlds, who often do not have access to the Internet, and are hard to reach for in-person.  I also discussed the current methods being used to collect data through surveys around the world, and, finally, what we’ve been learning at GeoPoll about the best ways to collect data from hard-to-reach places around the world.  For example, in regions with low literacy like Afghanistan and Niger, we have found success using voice recorded surveys.  In general, we have found that sending SMS surveys in mornings and evenings, as well as Sundays, to be among the best times to survey.  Throughout my talk, I emphasized that while partnering directly with carriers and sending surveys through mobile phones can be tricky, by constantly testing, piloting, and running experiments we are building powerful panels to help our clients make informed decisions.

After my talk, I had some great conversations with people working in similar markets reflecting on common challenges and opportunities.  Many thanks to those participants and the organizers for making my week in Santa Clara so enriching.

The post GeoPoll at Santa Clara Strata Conference 2014 – Infrastructure, insights and impact appeared first on GeoPoll.

Thanks to the high adoption of cell phones in developing countries, across all socio-economic classes, this is a reality for more people than ever before. Today, there are more cell phones in Asia and Africa than toilets, according to BluePlanetNetwork. What this means for the survey world is revolutionary; for business and for global change.

These new opportunities allow partnerships like our recent collaboration with IST Research. We were able to collect 248 responses within four days for a Teacher Survey in Afghanistan. We used Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for these surveys. IVR is a voice-based survey used to reach marginalized populations with low literacy rates.

We asked them general demographics questions, finding that 68% speak Dari and 75% are male. We also asked them questions about their living conditions, learning that over half of the teachers lived within five KM from the school, but 22% still lived over 16 KM away. Then we asked about their incomes, discovering that 66% of teachers receive their paycheck by hand, and almost 75% would prefer to receive them through their mobile phones.

Mobile-based surveys, whether SMS or IVR, provide real-time data for a wider range of demographics. They offer faster results than traditional survey styles and a wider sample size than web-based survey styles.

The surveys collected in Afghanistan will provide data that is generally hard to find and will provide quicker insights which allow for short-term action.

When it comes right down to it though, it’s not about the data, the survey responses or the opportunities that are uncovered. What it all comes down to are the people. The chance to give them something that many take for granted—a voice—and a chance to use that voice to advocate for change. Of course, the data is nothing to ignore, but the ability to revolutionize the way that data is collected in order use to make the world a better place is worth so much more.

###

GeoPoll is changing the way data is collected. GeoPoll connects researchers to mobile phone users in just about every country in the world, reaching people from dense urban areas to remote villages. GeoPoll’s user base and global reach allows you to identify, target and understand the world faster and more accurately than ever before.

The post Using Text to Give a Voice to the Voiceless appeared first on GeoPoll.

Monitoring and evaluation is a tricky business. We’ve all heard stories of wasted aid money and even well-intentioned programs that somehow fail to move the needle. If there are so many monitors and evaluators all over the world, why does this still happen? The truth is development is hard to evaluate, and experts are always striving towards new ways: collaboration, using multiple methods, and adopting new technologies. Our favorite is the buzz-word we kept hearing throughout the conference: “citizen-based evaluation.” After all, what better way is there to find out if a program or service is working than to ask the people most affected. Let the people speak.

Citizen-based monitoring is what GeoPoll does best, and with technological advances, it’s now possible to have more frequent engagement with stakeholders, thereby better gauging progress and allowing for mid-course corrections when needed. For evaluators, it’s really a brilliant strategy. This isn’t something that replaces other methods, but rather another great tool, and that can enhance the effectiveness of everything in the toolbox.

Donors and governments can argue with negative findings in an evaluation, complaining it was subjective or the evaluators didn’t understand the situation well enough, but how do you argue when thousands of recipients of a project say there was no appreciable impact on their lives, that the water isn’t as readily available as promised, teachers in the new school aren’t showing up, or promised medicine is rarely available at the clinic? In the inverse, how do development agencies and foundations cut funding when thousands of people report how their prospects have been improved since the building of a new road, electric plant, or hospital? It’s hard to disagree with ten thousand voices, one hundred thousand, or even a million.

What I love best at GeoPoll is getting to watch citizen-based monitoring up close and personal- their own voices, no filters, no biases, just the word of the people. It is a thrilling and humbling experience to see a text come in from a young person in Tunisia, a voice recording from a woman in Afghanistan, or a person in the midst of the chaos in Eastern DRC, and to know these are just a few of the thousands of thoughts and opinions we are gathering, That’s people power. Let the people speak!

The post A Survey Worth A Thousand Words appeared first on GeoPoll.